basic is like toki pona then i guess, like python but even easeier
no wait, that ones gray snail (minimalist vocabulary: it has only 4 commands)
This is great.
If I could make one change, there’s so many funnier languages that could have been Esperanto. I would have taken a shameless jab at F#, myself.
What about basic and assembly? Even Pascal?
Yeah I’ve not done any coding in a while.
As a python developer, I’ll accept the shower joke in stride. But who are these Esperanto speakers you’re shitting on?
It’s just Shatner, isn’t it? Except even he doesn’t really speak it even though he was in a movie that was entirely Esperanto.
Out of curuosity, what is the programming equivalent of Japanese?
Can’t imagine there is any. You need to learn three scripts to read Japanese fluently IINM. Katagana, Hirigana and something else… Probably someone who speaks Japanese can say.
The something else is called kanji, and are very complicated characters stolen from China with many meanings and pronunciation. Learning Japanese is very 楽しい (it is really)
APL
Forth
Clojure, a simple grammar but most of the vocabulary is imported from another language.
I was tempted to say Ruby, but based on my friends that are learning (or tried to learn Japanese), it seems like Ruby is trying to be the opposite. So not sure.
Ruby would maybe fit with toki pona : terse, simple, predictable.
as someone with some knowledge of japanese, japanese is extraordinarily terse, simple, and predictable. anyone who’s seen some anime should be familiar with this - there’s an incredible number of set phrases that carry a conversation in a precise way (that minimizes surprise)
Ruby is literally Japanese. It was invented there. Plus a Danish guy popularized it outside of Japan. Like how weebs spurred interest in Japan and the Japanese language outside Japan.
I was going to say toki pona is not quite brainfuck but at least somewhere in that direction, with its tiny vocab
I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.
IDK, comparing Javascript to English while Java to German seems to either overblow the value of javascript or diminish the value of English.
Yeah German isn’t nearly as bad as Java either. Also what is asm? Phoenetic script?
As someone with a background in linguistics, my jimmies are indeed rustled.
How so? Except the first sentence which is obviously not serious, I would agree with all linguistic statements or at least not disagree with any.
I think the first sentence is probably enough to make anyone not afflicted with a eurocentric brain want to palm some face.
I think excusing it as a “not serious” statement is dangerous, as a lot of people even on Lemmy won’t second guess it.
The belief that the west is the origin of all science and culture is surprisingly pervasive, especially in the tech industry.
“The root of all modern languages” is a heck of a thing to say about Latin, and I’m pretty sure several billion people haven’t quite gotten that memo. Calling a chunk of Europe and a thin slice of Africa “the entire Universe” is also a spicy take. Come for the programmer humor, recoil in disgust for the rampant ethnocentrism, I guess.
I don’t disagree but I would still give the benefit of a doubt that “the whole universe” is such an exaggeration that it makes the overstatement obvious. But it would also be read as a praise. Overall, I wouldn’t take it all to seriously. Made me laugh but I also see the eurocentrism and it’s good to be aware of it.
For one, Latin has more fancy rules than French. I guess the subjunctive is probably something English speakers might consider fancy, but Latin has that too. Latin has more times that are conjugations of the core verb (rather than needing auxiliary verbs), has grammatical cases (like German, but two more if you include vocative) and, idk, also just feels fancier in general.
I’ll admit it’s been years since I actually read any Latin and that I only have a surface level understanding of all languages mentioned except for French, but this post reads like it’s about the stereotypes of the countries rather than being about the languages themselves.
Latin has more rules, but they’re more utilitarian than fancy. Latin rules are there to make sure you understand exactly what is being said. French rules are there to make everything elegant and confusing, like high fashion.
First, I wouldn’t count the vocative but let’s not get into this debate. Counting cases, Russian wins until you include other balto slavic languages or even Uralic ones.
Fancy is a very subjective term. Auxiliary verbs are fancy in their own way. From an orthographical viewpoint, French is quite fancy with all the silent letters, the way vocals are pronounced and stuff. French had like one spelling “reform” and it was like let’s make it more obvious we decent from Latin. Grammar wise it’s just like the other romance languages from what I know. They once got rid of the silent <s> and put a “gravestone” on the letter before (^) that has no other meaning than here was a silent s. Wouldn’t you call that fancy? Who would call it fancy?
MwaMoi!Meh, as a native Dutch speaker auxiliary verbs feel really utilitarian to me, and not particularly fancy - like you said, that’s highly subjective.
As for cases, I didn’t say Latin or German had the most, but just that I think they’re fancy and that Latin has them while French doesn’t.
So you speak a V2 language like me? I’m German btw. Let me give you an outside perspective on auxiliary verbs in continental western Germanic languages:
The verb comes in second position (hence V2). Using an auxiliary verb moves the content verb to the very end of the sentence. It totally messes with the syntax.
But that’s besides my point. My point wasn’t that French auxiliary verbs are fancy but that fancy can me many things, in French it’s the spelling and pronunciation. Cases aren’t fancy, at least not the German or Latin ones. The slavic cases are a different story, in my objective opinion.
Haha I decline your proposal not to get into that debate: the vocative is a grammatical case. Maybe not every noun can be put in the vocative, but it’s definitely one of the cases. Even the locative is a case, even though only a couple of nouns use it.
To be clear, in general the vocative is a case eg in Czech and other balto slavic languages (except eg standard Russian while colloquial Russian is developing a new unrelated one).
In Latin tho, it’s more a relict. Other cases have relicts, too, still I wouldn’t say Latin has the locative.
I would argue that being a relict is a spectrum. Technically, it is a case with many syncretism to nominative, since it is obligatory for those nouns. In the context of LAtiN hAs sOo0 ManY cAsES, it’s not.
The Ohio State University seems to think these are both cases: https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/latin-case .
and there are vestiges of a seventh, the Locative.
I called it relicts but it’s basically what I said. Maybe vestiges is the better word in English, in German we say “Relikte”.
I mean, French is vulgar Latin at best. And even if it wasn’t obviously spoken by all sorts of French people, elites or not, it’s also the official language of a bunch of other countries, from Monaco to Niger. “Elites and certain circles” is a very weird read, which I’m guessing is based on US stereotypes on the French? I don’t even think the British would commit to associating the French with elitism.
Russian speakers being “mostly autoritarian left” is also… kind of a lot to assume? I’m not even getting into that one further. I don’t know if the Esperanto one checks out, either. “Esperanto speaker” is the type of group, and this is true, whose wikipedia page doesn’t include statistics but instead just a list of names. Which is hilarious, but maybe not a great Python analogue. It may still be the best pairing there, because to my knowledge English speakers aren’t any worse at speaking English than the speakers of any other language. They are more monolingual, though.
It just all sounds extremely anglocentric to me, which is what it is, I suppose, but it really messes with the joke if you’re joking about languages specifically. One could do better with this concept, I think.
I think the elitism regards of French isn’t about French native speakers but about second language learners. French was the lingua franca in Europe for quite a while and using French loan words makes you sound more fancy and eloquent in many languages (compare “adult” with “grownup” which is a Latin loan word but I can’t think of a real example so I hope no one will notice).
The Russian bit I totally agree. Esperanto vs python is quite a leap, I agree. Showing a list (that’s probably not conclusive but still) is telling when compared to the go to beginners programming language. Still there are parallels in the design and intention. No comparison is ever perfect.
All in all it’s not perfect but as a joke, it works for me. Sure, it’s not unbiased but if not taken too seriously, I can laugh about it, and I can over analyze it for fun so win win for me.
Yeah, but that’s my point. The author clearly isn’t thinking about the hundreds of millions of native French speakers around the world, they’re an American thinking the word “mutton” sounds fancier than “sheep”… in English.
Which yeah, okay, that’s their cultural upbringing causing that, but then maybe don’t make a joke entirely predicated on making sharp observations about how languages work and aimed specifically at nerds. I can only ever go “it’s funny because it’s true” or be extremely judgmental of your incorrect assumptions about how languages work here.
your incorrect assumptions
Why make it about me? I was more or less playing devil’s advocate, saying if not taken seriously it’s funny.
I would be more likely to agree with you if you put “OP’s assumption”. Your phrasing makes me want to double down on my original position.
That’s just a general recommendation for discussions in general, online and offline. I learned a thing or two about my biases and perspectives here. Btw I’m German and that part resonated with me from my little experience with JAVA and my experience in learning about my native language and teaching it to others.
Oh, sorry, you misunderstood, I didn’t mean you specifically, I mean you as in “why would you ever do this”, as in “why would anybody ever do this”.
Languages, as we’ve established, are complicated.
It’s kinda funny, I’m Flemish and a lot of French loan words (ambriage, merci, nondedju = nom de dieu to name a few) are mainly used in dialect, and therefore don’t make you sounds sophisticated or worldly at all.
From what I know it’s similar in Swiss German (with words like merci and velo (bike)). I don’t know about Fleming but Swiss embraces their dialects so it isn’t stigmatized either
Heh, we use velo as well. And yeah, we don’t really stigmatise dialects that much either, though depending on how much dialect you use people might find it unprofessional.
About Esperanto, since it’s not a national language (intentionally so) it’s hard to do a census of speakers.
Also, to what level is considered “speaking Esperanto”? Taking the Duolingo course? Having it as a “mother tongue” where both parents speak it in a household in order to communicate? These are both probably countable, and produce wildly different numbers.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think that’s the reason. I also think those numbers may be different but they may both be indistinguishable from zero when plotted against natural languages. You’re right about it being hard to define what counts as a “Esperanto speaker”. I can’t decide if that makes the Python comparison better or worse, though.
Yeah, I do not think Python is a very good comparison.
I was thinking more like Clojure:
- Enthusiastic and friendly geeks trying to push their language on the world trying to make it a better place. They are both definitely not a little cultish!
- Language intended to be simple to learn with a limited and regular vocabulary, but can handle complicated work with ease.
- They both say that learning their language will make your mind better able to do other languages.
- A bridge between languages. Vanilla Clojure runs on the JVM and can invoke Java commands. But it has also been built on other platforms like JavaScript (ClojureScript), .NET (CLR), Python (Basilisp), BASH (Babashka), and others I think.
- The parts of both languages can be broken up, mixed, and matched, and used for other parts. In Esperanto, the fundamental elements can be broken down and made into other words. In Clojure, you’ve got functions and lists - and higher order functions that work on functions and lists, and lists of functions, and functions of lists.
- Did I mention: Friendly & welcoming geeks that lo-o-o-ove newbies! Seriously, both Clojure nerds and Esperanto nerds are unnaturally nice and would like to welcome you to the club. They’ve got tons of free resources for you to learn it.
Honestly, I think both are right. Both are simple languages that expand your way of thinking, and are probably both worth learning, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I guess assembler is sumerien then, only still written and understood? And cobol or fortran? Linear a and b?
FORTRAN: Proto-Indo-European COBOL: Proto-Sino-Tibetic
Assembly: neuron signals
Assembly is ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs.
Literally all of these languages are rooted in English.
C: printf()
C++: cout
JavaScript: document.write() or window.print()
Java: system.out.println()
Python: print()
Rust: print()
Exactly zero of those reference a language other than English. I’m not even a linguist and this is just silly. It’s literally part of why English is becoming the dominant world language, because if you learn computer programming you basically have to learn English.
Whoosh!
Have an sympathy upvote.
This is the programming humor community. Emphasis on the humor part.
Humor comes fast to you, but you’re obviously faster.
Damn!
I mean, that’s fair. I get it, I just don’t really find it very funny.
From your comment, I’m not convinced you do get it. You wrote a lot of words completely beside the point of the joke, which is a series of analogies, not a statement about the natural languages involved in the creation of programming languages.
Yet somehow the top comment is basically saying what I’m saying. Interesting.
This comment? https://fedia.io/m/programmer_humor@programming.dev/t/1239473/-/comment/7462582
I honestly do not understand what similarity you see between “this post seems like it will make linguists angry” and “the languages in this joke actually use English keywords and standard library names.” The post isn’t even about keywords and names.
It’s not the same to continue with the joke and to completely miss the point and complain about it.
The first is funny, the second is sad. I believe I had to clarify that for you
I finally found the real reason why I like java: I‘m german
That’s the reason I’m deeply offended. I’m german too. 😉
I’m also German, and our beautiful language being compared to java feels like an insult to me.
Strength in diversity, I guess
Swabian here. I like C#. Guess that fits.
Have you ever tried kotlin?
I don’t get why I don’t like Rust then
Do you like Russian, tho? Some Russians I’ve encountered did find it overcomplicated at times… Но в целом понимаю: мне норм заходит энглиш, а жабаскрипт вообще мимо
вообще мимо
Please help, я это не понимаю.
Basically translates to “despite me liking English, js is not my cup of tea”. “Вообще мимо” can also be more literally translated as “a complete miss”, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s used that way
You will, comrade.
I also love Java, especially all the goodies added in 17. I’m not German though… 🤔
You are now. Herzlichen Glückwunsch.
Maybe you‘d have fun learning german then ;)
Гарантийный без ошибка памяти!
I unironically think it would be hilarious to write a borrow checker for Адрес.
Didn’t even know it
Not surprised. The Russian Wikipedia page on it is just a stub. The English one is actually longer.
I can’t find any online introductions to it or compilers for it either, in English or написал по-Русски. Or Ukrainian for that matter, assuming I’d know it if I see it, although the Wikipedia page is longer.
Why is everyone down on Rust? Seriously. I don’t know it but I’ve considered learning it and it appeals to me and people literally scoff when I mention it. Saw it referred to as a meme language on Lemmy, which is built in Rust. What am I missing?
For me “The Critical Flaw” of rust is its compiler. And requirent of 12 GB of disk space to compile just the frontend of compiler. Even GCC will all frontends(C, C++, Ada, Fortran, Modula-2, JIT) requires less space.
But joke is probably about “rewrite in rust” culture.
that’s because Rust is more modern and in modern days we don’t rly have hard disk limitation, also it’s probably because the compiler tells you the solution to most problems
and in modern days we don’t rly have hard disk limitation
well if you are a corporation, that’s true. Otherwise, not much
I mean c’mon, every pc that can compile rust in a reasonable time has at least 20gb of storage
Wow that’s enormous. I’ll have to learn more about that. Thanks for the info!
I don’t think many ppl are down on rust… it’s won developer’s most favorite to use for like 5+ years now in a row on stackoverflow.
I think rust has good ideas and may even become the default systems language in the mid-term. I find it irritating that there is a very vocal subset of rust proponents that tend to insist that every project in every language needs to be rewritten in rust immediately. I suspect that is also why other people are down on rust.
That makes sense! Thanks for your insight
Imo it’s bc it’s the new kid on the block. Yes it’s 10 years old but barely becoming common use in production and government mandates are only speeding that up. In actuality it’s a great language and has been hyped for a few years by people who actually use it. Python went through the same thing in the 2010s where devs really tried clowning on it, now it’s used everywhere.
Good to know, I’ve only need a dev since 2019 so I appreciate the long view
i think it’s mainly people being cranky and set in their ways. they got used to working around all the footguns/bad design decisions of the C/C++ specifications and really don’t want to feel like it was all for nothing. they’re comfortable with C/C++, and rust is new and uncomfortable. i think for some people, being a C/C++ developer is also a big part of their identity, and it might be uncomfortable to let that go.
i also think there’s a historical precedent for this kind of thing: when a new way of doing things emerges, many of the people who grew up doing it the old way get upset about it and refuse to accept that the new way might be an improvement.
Some rust proponents having this attitude is probably part of the problem.
Is Rust as close to the metal as C? Seems like there would still be a need for C. I could see Rust replacing Java as something that’s so ceremonial and verbose, but from my limited perspective as a sometimes java dev, having only the most glancing experience with C, it seems like C would be hard to replace because of what it is. Buy I honestly don’t know much about Rust either, I just think JS is so finicky and unpredictable whereas web assembly seems extremely fast and stable.
Rust can create native binaries but I wouldn’t call it close to the metal like C. It’s certainly possible to bootstrap from assembly to Rust but, unlike C, every operation doesn’t have a direct analog to an assembly operation. For example Rust needs to be able to dynamically allocate memory for all of its syntax to be intact.
Thank you for the explanation.
For example Rust needs to be able to dynamically allocate memory for all of its syntax to be intact.
Hmm, you got an example of what you mean?
Rust can be used without allocations, as is for example commonly done with embedded.
That does mean, you can’t use dynamically sized types, likeString,VecandPathBuf, but I wouldn’t consider those part of the syntax, they’re rather in the std lib…So you’re right that this is a bit arbitrary because the line between the standard lib and the language is blurry, but someone writing Rust is going to expect Vec to work, it doesn’t even require an extra “use” to get it.
Perhaps a better core example would be operator overloading (or really any place using traits). When looking at “a + b” in Rust you have to be aware that, depending on the types involved, that could mean anything.
Anyway, I love Rust, it just doesn’t have the 1:1 relationship with the assembly output that C basically still has.
I mean, the simple proof is that Rust has been growing by leaps and bounds in the embedded world, which is the closest to bare metal you get. It’s also being used in the Linux kernel and Windows, and there are several projects building new kernels in pure Rust. So yeah, it’s safe to say that it’s as close to the metal as C.
Also, the comparison to Java is understandable if you’ve only been exposed to Rust by the memes, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Rust has a lot more syntax than C (although that’s not saying much), but it’s one of the most expressive languages on the market today.
It’s slightly less close to the metal as C. Array bounds checks are always going to cost you something, for example. However, if you look at the speed of numeric computation in C, Rust, and Go, they’re all in the same order of magnitude performance compared to things like Python or JavaScript (not including things like PyPi, which is C with extra steps).
Wow thanks so much for breaking that down for me! The discussions I’ve been having here and the information devs are sharing is really kicking me off the fence about learning Rust
Eh, I’d still go for it. I find the Rust compiler tends to amplify my impostor syndrome–it tells you all the ways you are objectively being stupid. I know that’s not really selling it, but it’s doing that stuff for a reason. I’m especially hopeful that it becomes the standard way to do things with microcontrollers; that’s about the only place I write C/C++ at all.
It’s like a good C++ that is actually able to replace it. There are lots of places where a good C++ is useful. Like everything that needs low latency and low resource usage.
But it’s not an easy language, so (I’m guessing) people who see everyone loving it but are unable to learn it start to suffer some sort of cognitive dissonance. If it’s too difficult for me to learn, that must be its fault, not mine.
I think ppl just got pissed with the fanboys unironically asking to RIIR everything. The language itself is comfy AF, tho
Butthurt C devs don’t want it replacing their language.
as guy who likes c: think rust is a good and cool idea
Cause it’s a C++ replacement when said audience never asked for one. It’s great but it’s still waaaayy too early, people need to slowly get comfortable with it.
I want to disagree on German. It isn’t verbose. We’ve got several words where there isn’t an equivalent in pretty much any other languages. Including Schadenfreude und Torschlusspanik (the feeling that you are getting older l, can’t find a partner and will die alone).
The same EU legal text has in German 22.118 words Vs English 24.698.
The making me cry part, that’s fair. Overcomplicated, could be worse.
My favorite German words are verschlimmbessern and Backpfeifengesicht.
Here is a list with explanation and more examples:
https://callinggermanyhome.com/cool-german-words/I think word count is not the best metric precisely because of what you mention. “Krankenversicherungskarte” is one word vs the three word “health insurance card”, but they convey the same information in roughly the same amount of characters.
Overall I don’t find German particularly verbose, only sometimes a small phrase is condensed into a single word.
Hm?
I don’t know german but it seems to be more logical to have one word for “health insurance card” since it describes one class of objects. Better than spelling 3 nouns where one partially describes what object is and other nouns act like clarification
I wonder what the best programming analogue is for combining words into one where other languages keep them separate; maybe the functional-style chains of adapters?
The same EU legal text has in German 22.118 words Vs English 24.698.
That needs a character count really. Words isn’t a particularly relevant measure when the language uses compound words
Java class names look like German compound nouns though
That’s bullshit, we don’t do camel case!
I suspect there’s more people who speak Python fluently than Esperanto. So that comparison sits very wrong with me. The rest was funny :)
Nobody mentioned number of speakers though
No, but the adoption rate is likely related to how useful the language is?
Esperanto always struck me as more perl-like with each part of speech having its own suffix like perl has $ for scalars, @ for arrays, and % for hashes. Though perl is probably more like a bunch of pidgins…
Yeah, I was about to say.
Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.
PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.
Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.
Esperanto’s equivalent would probably be Haskell.
Python is probably more like Spanish. Very easy basics, but then people from different regions of where it’s has spread out barely understand each other
It’s probably a similar learning speed
There’s nothing left from Russia anymore.
the thing with russian is that it’s not spoken only by russians. Russian-speaking part of the internet is quite large actually.
There’s still some Russia left. But hopefully Ukraine will change that soon :)
Perl is… forgotten entirely, despite its efforts in getting us from there to here.
Yup, checks out.
PHP also, but good riddance:-D.
Shell scripting is the ink that makes up these words - without them, you would never have seen this image.
I think Perl is closer to Esperanto - the vast majority of people will never want to learn it and the people that know it won’t stfu about how everyone should use it! And they could all use a shower!
(I kid… Mostly)
Plus it has markers for variable types just like Esperanto has suffixes for parts of speech. Wall was a linguist, after all.
You… you shut up! Excuse me, I have to go take a shower:-) (/s)
Anyway you’re right (no /s) - at one point it filled in a gap between the likes of C++ and Assembly on the one hand and shell scripting (bash, awk, grep, sed, each with its own syntax and very little of that shared in common with one another) and I guess Fortran on the other. I still prefer it enormously to everything else - it’s quirky but fun:-) - though I get why a less experienced person should choose Python and stick with it, even as we all wish that there was another alternative that would work better than either.
And since I can’t resist: Perl is 8-20x faster than Python, and major websites like DuckDuckGo and booking.com use it. Sigh…I guess it’s time for that shower now:-).
No, that’s perfect
As a Perl user who won’t shut up about it… Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty fair.
